Welcome back to the series where we look to the stars to better understand ourselves. As a coach, my work often begins in a place of quiet dissonance. I speak with people who have checked all the right boxes, yet they carry a persistent, nagging feeling that something is off. They feel like they’re playing a role, following a script that was handed to them, their own inner voice growing fainter with each passing year. It’s the feeling of living an artificial life.
As we’ve explored before, I believe the most profound truths about the human condition are often found not in textbooks, but in stories. It’s why this series uses science fiction as a powerful thought experiment for the soul. By taking our deepest anxieties and placing them in a futuristic, unfamiliar world, sci-fi allows us to see our own lives with shocking clarity. It uses the unreal to reveal what is most real about us.
For this series, we are diving into a book that takes this exploration to its absolute limit: Philip K. Dick’s haunting 1968 masterpiece, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
On the surface, it’s a detective story set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco. But beneath the noir exterior, it is a relentless, philosophical investigation into the very things my clients and I explore every day: What does it mean to be authentic in a world that rewards imitation? How do we find purpose when our role feels meaningless? Where is the line between our true selves and the personas we project?
The book’s central conflict revolves around bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s mission to “retire” rogue androids who are physically indistinguishable from humans. The only way to tell them apart is through an empathy test, forcing Deckard—and the reader—into a deeply uncomfortable space, the uncanny valley between the artificial and the authentic.
Over the next seven articles, we will journey into this uncanny valley together. We will use the central themes of Deckard’s world as a lens to examine our own. We will explore how the desperate search for a real animal mirrors our own crisis of confidence, how the empathy test is a metaphor for our struggle with authenticity, and how the mysterious religion of Mercerism can teach us about purpose and resilience. This series is an invitation to look into the rain-slicked, neon-lit future of this incredible story and, in its reflection, see our own professional lives more clearly.
